Many individuals are increasingly utilizing wireless communication devices to stream media content from sources over a communication network. For example, a user of a wireless communication device may request audio, video, text, and other data from a content provider, and the content provider will stream the requested media to the wireless communication device. When the user of the communication device requests content from the content provider, typically the requested media is transferred from the content provider to the communication device for the use or enjoyment of the user.
However, as more users increasingly employ wireless devices to stream content over wireless links, the heavy bandwidth consumption required to transfer such content becomes a key constraint to the quality of service provided to the users. For example, streaming video content consumes more bandwidth for an extended amount of time compared to a simple web page consisting of images and text. Past solutions to address this problem include controlling the bandwidth consumed by a device based on its real-time data bandwidth. For example, if a device is dropping several streaming video packets, the bit rate of the content being streamed is reduced until the device stops requesting retransmission of dropped packets. Unfortunately, this bandwidth reduction may cause a degradation in the quality of the video feed, and does not consider how the data is being used by the device, which may result in limiting more bandwidth than necessary.